Unable to import AVCHD (BMDV) movies to photos app since High Sierra update

I ran into this yesterday and it significantly screwed up my workflow and cost me an extra hour of time. Happened again today with a brand new SD card. Photos doesn't recognize videos on the card yet my MacBook running regular Sierra recognizes them just fine. Importing via-Media Encoder and VLC brings the files in with no audio.

This is ridiculous. COME ON APPLE.

Hi Flash:

I spent 2 hours today with a Senior Apple Engineer. There is a go around... It's called VLC Media player. It will open the mts files in Apple. I've been trying to figure out how to tell Quicktime to use it so it will work with Premiere but so far I haven't been able to do that. The Apple engineer told me that they will be working hard on this the next days and will have update to fix it soon.

Connect to the camera using USB cable. Both SD card and Camera come up. Open the AVCHD folder and the files will come up in quick time. Copy to hard drive to view internally in FCP

This has been going on for several weeks now and hundreds of post about it on both Apple and Adobe. I got Apple Support on the phone at 5am Sunday morning and they spent about 2 hours with me.. They said they had no report of this problem and luckily I had copied many of the comments from this and other boards. They got a suppervisor on the phone with me. I'm to call them back tomorrow and they are putting an engineer on the phone with me. They assured me that they will solve it. We'll see... but this cost me a client and really has made me look bad.

Hold the presses. I tried this strategy of b.art's: Re: Unable to import AVCHD (BMDV) movies to photos app since High Sierra update

It worked. I can now just click on the AVCHD files and they work as before. Note I also had done an NVRAM reset as per the above post so maybe that was involved too. Anyway, thanks to b.art!!

Sadly, you are correct. It's also possible to import the clips straight from the SD card into iMovie and use File->Reveal in Finder to get to the files but the result is the same: .mov files apparently without supporting information. Actually, looking at some pre-High Sierra clips already in Photos from the last 2 years, they seem to be in a similar state. Hmmm...

Same issue. I used to brag about Mac being so simple to use. I'd hook up my Sony vid camera and just drag everything over, bingo, no problem.

Now since High Sierra ("It'll be fine," they said. "Upgrade," they said) when I go through the same procedure it's:

Plug in camera. See AVCHD file. Click on it. Get a window of video thumbnails. Click on the relevant one to open. Quicktime teases with a swirl then says "Could not open file."

Restarting, unplugging, beginning again, nothing works. IMovie imports the video but *without sound*!

I spent over two hours of my time on this this morning when I had a zillion other things to do.

There was a "ProVideo" update for various codecs on Dec. 15th (JST) that gave me high hopes.

Unfortunately after installing I'm still having the same problem, so, no dice quite yet. Hopefully it's just a matter of time.

Very unfortunate that I have to use iMovie or Quicktime as a workaround to importing videos that I never plan on doing much editing of except maybe a trim.

First, iPhoto lost (or never had) the ability to read exFAT cards (>32GB) and now Photos loses the ability to import AVCHD.

Frankly, that's a regression and a malicious one given there was obvious intent and no notification that I am aware of...

I have a Canon HD Vixia video recorder and never had a problem in the past. The .mov files always showed up when opening Photos on the Mac. They do not show up any longer for import, must have been the last upgrade. Video Recorder is recognized but not the videos so unable to import. Found a way to save them to the Mac but video information does not transfer. No longer plug and play with Apple, horrible.

IN iPhoto: If you were to export the video files to a desktop folder, then import those videos into PHOTO app all the info data should be intact. You can fix the date and times from within High Sierra Photos app.

The older iPhoto to import these video files worked for me and others. Read my post and some others on this subject recently. It probably is not the card.

Have had similar problems with Quicktime and FCPX for weeks now. Deleting this codec solved my problem. Thanks b.art

Thank you for your answer, yet it is of no real help.

How did you move the video files to the fotos database and were the dates correct ?

I have a brand new Sony Alpha II and only the pics are recognized.

Any word on this? My students are giving presentations that I can now record, but if I want to get them off the camera I'm SOL unless Apple comes through and soon.

Note I just downloaded the newest "update" hoping that would fix things. It didn't. I get now some error 1718449215 and nothing happens. I can't even open the movies out of the AVCHD file.